(PODCAST) "Keep Your Eye On The Pain That's Coming:" Trump’s First Speech to Congress w/ Bill Scher and Paul Glastris

The Washington Monthly editors dissect Trump’s address and discuss how real-world consequences will ultimately determine the GOP’s fate.

Washington Monthly Politics Editor Bill Scher and Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris join Anne Kim for the Monthly’s first ever politics livestream, the morning after Donald Trump’s first speech to a joint session of Congress. Trump doubled down on tariffs and taking Greenland. He demonized immigrants and trans Americans. And by his own account, he’s just getting started.

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Below is a transcript of the conversation lightly edited for clarity:

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Anne K.: Hello and welcome to our first ever live stream of the Washington Monthly podcast. I'm Anne Kim and I'm contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. I'm joined this morning by Bill Scher, the monthly's politics editor and by Paul Glastris, the monthly's editor in chief. Our other cohost, Garrett Epps is out on break. So just a quick note before we begin, previous episodes of our podcasts are available on YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. And we hope that you will share, like and subscribe.

So guys, let's begin with last night. This was Donald Trump's first speech to a joint session of Congress. And just as a quick recap for the listeners who had the good fortune or the good sense to skip the speech, what we heard was Trump bragging about his achievements so far, firing federal workers, canceling federal contracts. He doubled down on tariffs. He demonized immigrants and trans people. He vowed to get Greenland, quote, one way or another.

Anything I'm missing and what did you guys think of this whole spectacle?

Bill Scher: Nothing that really should shock anybody beyond our capacity to already be shocked. It seemed like a rehash of stuff from the rallies, the usual relitigating things that don't need to be rehashed anymore. Like the election results, the radical, imperialistic proposals like seizing Greenland and Panama Canal, quadrupling down on tariffs. It's all the stuff that's been in the air for the past two months.

I hesitate to say boiled down because it's the longest joint address speech by a president of all time. I don't think it has all that much import, except maybe typically these things are meant to sort of kick off the legislative agenda of the year. And I don't really think that's the thrust of this.

Anne K.: An hour and a half at least, right?

Bill Scher: It was more about "here's what I am doing as your king, and I get to do whatever I want to do. And it's already working fantastically." Let's just ignore the stock market, ignore the economic uncertainty, ignore the inflation fears, ignore the drops in consumer sentiment. And to go hard on tariffs anew is only going to add to that fear in the economy that we don't really know what's coming next or how it's going to impact things. The import is that the economic uncertainty isn't going to go away anytime soon.

Anne K.: Paul, you've written speeches like this when you were a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. What were your thoughts both as a speechwriter, but also as a political analyst and a citizen?

Paul Glastris: Well, you know, the State of the Union, which is an institution that I have a weird affinity for having worked on them, has changed over the decades since Bill Clinton was giving them. Back in my day, as the kids say, the speech really was one where the president was trying to speak to the whole of the country, trying to bring people in to his vision and really going to Congress and say, here's my agenda. I'd like to work with you both sides of the aisle to get this done.

Over time, they've become more and more partisan directed at the base of the party. This was a giant step in that direction. No one who didn't vote for Trump would have enjoyed that speech. It wasn't for anyone who didn't support Trump. It was totally a rally speech, as Bill said.

The structure of it kind of followed past States of the Union in that there were lots of heroes who survived trauma, and "we salute you," although the heroes tended to be people whose sons and daughters were killed by illegal immigrants. There was a little bit of casual racism here and there. Did you catch him calling somebody Pocahontas? I don't know who that was for.

Anne K.: Elizabeth Warren, right?

Bill Scher: A little, yeah.

Paul Glastris: I think if you were a Trump supporter, you loved it. The thing that was really different to me was it was a "morning in America" speech. My God, things are going great. Look at this great country. And, you know, we're a few weeks into his administration. And as Bill said, the stock market's down, consumer confidence is down, inflation is up. We just had job numbers. The private sector created 77,000 jobs in January or February, I think it was. And if you place on top of that the loss of federal jobs, there's already an Atlanta Fed measure saying we've had negative growth, maybe we're ending a recession.

So it really skated over the potential catastrophic results of this first few weeks of shock and awe. Instead it was an attempt to tell people, boy, is this going to be great. There was a great moment where he said, "We've done more than any other administration in history, even more than George Washington." And it reminded me of John Lennon back in the early 60s saying, "We're bigger than Jesus." What it didn't say was more dramatic than what it did say.

Anne K.: So Paul, I take your point about how these speeches have become more politicized over time and how they become more like rallies. But it did seem to me that there are a few ways in which that speech last night continued to break norms of decorum, if nothing else. He mentioned President Biden, attacked President Biden by name at least half a dozen times, maybe 10 times, and the casual racism that you mentioned was pretty frequent. In what ways do you think he stretched the envelope for the worse?

Paul Glastris: Past presidents, all presidents come in and say, it was a disaster. I'm taking over in times of trouble. Trust me, I have a plan. It was difficult to make that case. In the case of Donald Trump, he did, in fact, inherit record low unemployment, a tremendous drop in illegal immigration, tremendous drop in crime, inflation under control, record entrepreneurship. The public didn't agree that it was a strong economy, but the fact is that it was.

And so in that situation, you just have to lie. You just have to pretend everything was a disaster. In a diabolical way, bringing up Biden could be a good gamble. Biden didn't do what Trump did because he was living under the old strictures of decorum. He didn't say, "My God, this Donald Trump guy, what a disaster he left me." He didn't blame things on Trump early and often and therefore didn't set a narrative out for the American public. And that wound up leading to the public thinking things are kind of not bad under Trump but terrible now.

So there's a political calculation there, even though it's based on flim-flam.

Anne K.: That actually leads very nicely into what I want to talk about next, which is to get your thoughts on the Democratic response. There was Senator Elizabeth Slotkin's rebuttal, which we'll get to, but there were also just a lot of different strategies, for lack of a better word, to protest this administration on the part of Democrats. Some people like AOC and Senator Chris Murphy boycotted, had counter-programming. Female members were color coordinated in hot pink. A lot of members held up the little ping pong paddles and messages for the president. Others brought fired federal workers as guests and then Representative Alguin got himself ejected. Did all or any of this work? What would you have liked to have seen as a response?

Bill Scher: I hesitate to be super critical because I don't think it is of huge import. It's going to be pretty hard for Democrats to blow the house in 2026. They only need five seats. Even a halfway decent presidency would probably lose five seats to the opposition party in the midterm. The Democrats don't need an A-game to do that, and if they do blow it then you really got to wonder if they should go out of business.

So I don't want to nitpick too much, but just objectively to assess the past 24 hours, this exposed a severe lack of coordination and unanimity in terms of tactic. Clearly the leadership wanted Slotkin, Senator Slotkin to be the face – a moderate from a swing state with a carefully honed message that sort of had nods to soft Republicans while also trying to weave in some core liberal principles.

And you had backbenchers in the room that wanted to be far more confrontational and have Al Green get thrown out, have the signs, have the whiteboard, all those kinds of things. And so that spectacle crowds out what Slotkin and leadership wanted to do. She doesn't get to be the response; you now have multiple responses. So you end up feeding a bit of a "Democrats in disarray" narrative.

Now it may not actually be true disarray. They might very well work in lockstep very soon as we near this shutdown cliff next week. But it does make you wonder how tightly organized they are at the moment.

Anne K.: To follow up on this choice of Senator Slotkin of Michigan, who is generally known as more moderate. It's kind of an interesting choice because she's not a firebrand in the same way that AOC or Maxwell Frost or Jasmine Crockett are – one of the more very online younger members. So can you talk a little bit more about what you think that choice of Slotkin tells you about Democrats' strategy for reaching out to Democrats who may have defected to Trump? And what did you think of Senator Slotkin's response last night too?

Bill Scher: I thought Slotkin's response was pretty good. I don't think it's going to change the universe overnight, but as far as developing a framework that could unify the party going forward, I thought it was fairly well done. She surely didn't embarrass herself. Plenty of people do that job and just ruin their careers, and she didn't do that.

But it does show that in the leadership of the party, there is a concern that the left flank is a bit of a liability and they're trying to put forth a more moderate face. And of course, on the left flank, you have a concern that these centrists know it all, these political consultants, they want to poll test everything to death and they don't want to just throw a good roundhouse. So they're not on one page. I think there's elements of truth to both arguments.

But in an ideal world, you would just do your best to synthesize them and just get on the same page and not have open disagreement. But we saw essentially open disagreement in terms of tactic last night.

Paul Glastris: There's a lot of angst among members in Congress. Their base is screaming at them, "Do something. Don't just sit there." So I think what you saw with the paddles and the signs is some effort to show base liberal Democrats, "Yes, I'm fighting."

It's kind of hard to blame them. Democrats do feel innervated, frustrated, powerless. They want to see fight. Democrats have almost no power right now to do anything. And that's hard to swallow.

The wisdom of the Slotkin choice and the wisdom of her speech – first of all, Bill's right. She didn't screw up, and that is itself a victory in these very unfavorable conditions of trying to compete with a president who's got the floor of the House.

But what she did was a version of what James Carville advised in the New York Times op-ed recently – kind of sit back and let flow the disasters that she and many are betting are going to happen. She's trying to tell voters and Democrats in particular, this is not going to work out well for these folks. We are going to see pain imposed on the American people purposefully by a president and a party. Let's just keep your eye on the pain that's coming. And I thought that was a clear, compelling message and one Democrats would be wise to listen to.

Anne K.: Let's switch gears to one of these unfolding disasters, and that is the trade war that he has begun. Two days ago now, maybe just yesterday, he escalated his trade war with Canada, China, and Mexico. He's levying these 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for who knows what reason, and then additional 10% tariffs on China on top of the 10% he already levied last month. And then he mentioned last night about more tariffs on other countries in April. He name-checked Korea, India, basically saying something about "if they tariff us, we'll tariff them."

So when do you guys expect to see, aside from the economic impacts, which are going to be felt soon enough, when is the political reaction going to set in, if at all? Do you think people understand who's paying these tariffs in real life? What do you see happening on the political front as this all plays out?

Bill Scher: Well, they'll understand when they go to the store. And certainly at minimum, you're going to the store now and you're not seeing that much of a change. You're not seeing an improvement. And look, it would not be fair to expect a big price discount right away, except that Donald Trump promised you'd get one. He's the one that says "lower prices on day one." And now he's having to walk that back.

To a certain degree, from what I get anecdotally from person-on-the-street interviews in the media, some folks are openly frustrated. Some folks are like, "Well, I trust him. He knows business. I'm a little concerned, but I think it's all going to work out in the end."

At some point, if it doesn't work out, you know... I just met with a guy about my picket fence that needs to get fixed up or probably replaced – it's wood. And I asked the guy who came to my house for a quote, "How fast do you think I need to do this? If there's tariffs on Canadian lumber is it going to affect you?" And he was like, "Yeah that would affect me but I don't think Trump's really gonna do it. He understands business, it's not gonna really happen." And then a week later it happened.

This is why it essentially comes down to a matter of uncertainty. Is this in Trump's mind a big showy negotiating tactic that he will climb down from in short order as he did with Canada and Mexico a month ago? We saw this in the first term where he said, "I'm going to pull out of NAFTA." And then he didn't pull out of NAFTA right away. He negotiated a different deal, which was not all that different from NAFTA, but he slapped a new name on it and said it was the greatest deal of all time.

If he does something like that, then people aren't going to be all that upset. It's not going to make a big material difference. Sometimes it sounds like it's just a negotiating tactic. So the bigger thing coming down the pike is April 2nd, this global system of reciprocal tariffs, which he says, "If they want to come down on their tariffs, we'll come down on ours." That sounds like negotiation. And if people bow to Trump, maybe we, if not come out ahead, at least get back to a status quo that's not that big of a deal.

Sometimes he talks about tariffs as a good in and of itself. One of his trade aides recently said "we want to shift to a more tariff-based revenue system." And Trump himself talked about that on the campaign trail, bringing back the Gilded Age and William McKinley. He talks about it as if this was our wealthiest time as a country, when in fact it was a time of horrible economic inequality and a four-year long period called at the time the "Great Depression," which prompted people to say, this tariff system is actually quite terrible and regressive, let's move to progressive income taxes.

So if that's what he really wants deep down inside and everything else is just a flare to mask the fact that he just wants tariffs for tariff's sake, then people are gonna really feel that for the entirety of his presidency. It may be a merit to him, but if you're a congressional Republican who's going to be on the ballot in 2026, it's going to matter to you.

Anne K.: I saw an analysis from the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget. They were calculating how much revenue these tariffs would actually generate, to get to your point about whether he thinks this is something substantively that's sustainable. And even with the 25%, the estimate is about $100 billion in tariffs. And the federal government's going to be spending about $7 trillion. So you cannot sustain federal spending on tariffs.

Bill Scher: It's mathematical nonsense.

Paul Glastris: I think in the State of the Union, if you read it carefully, I think he's going for permanent tariffs, at least from that document. He said in that speech that we are going to shift to a tariff-based system. It's going to be wonderful. There are going to be some disruptions, was his euphemism. But we did that in my first term and the farmers came out ahead, and we're going to block all the incoming vegetables full of dirt and you're going to sell so many American products to Americans. You're not going to know how good your life is.

He's got a worldview and he's going to give it a try. He really wants to shift the entire global system of military alliances and trade arrangements. And he's rolling the dice. I'm not wise enough to know what the end result will be. But I think it is likely that it'll be very, very bad in the short and medium term.

There was a little bit of him telling his base, "Prepare, but understand it's all going to come out in the end" – a little pain to get to Valhalla, to get to a beautiful world, is going to all be worth it. I don't know if he's negotiating. I don't know if he's going to pull back. His commerce secretary keeps saying that... Marco Rubio had told Europe he would never pull out of Ukraine, he's just testing Putin to see if he's serious, and then boom, he pulls out of Ukraine. So he's kind of making a monkey out of everyone around him who says he's not serious.

Anne K.: Let's turn to another unfolding disaster, and that is the government shutdown that Bill alluded to earlier. Bill, you've written about this. It seems the Democrats again are kind of scrambling on whether to work with the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson and Senate Democrats on a clean CR or a CR with conditions or to risk a shutdown. So where do you stand now on what you think the Democratic strategy should be to secure as much of a political win as possible and also not to cause further damage to the country? Can they balance both aims?

Bill Scher: Well, what I think it should be – I think it should be driven by a main truth, and the truth as I see it is shutdowns are bad. No one likes them. You don't want to be blamed for one. And you get blamed for one when you make a demand that goes beyond the task at hand. The task is just to keep the government open.

Republicans are the usual ones that get blogged out on this because they'll say, polling shows that people don't like Obamacare. So if I say, "If you don't repeal Obamacare, I'm going to shut the government down," people are going to be happy with me because they don't like Obamacare. But even to the extent that was true, they may not like you tying the issue of Obamacare to keeping the government open. And you may take a position that had been popular and make it unpopular.

So if Democrats today said, "Boy, people are going to hate these giant Medicaid cuts, so I'm going to say keep the government open unless you shelve your Medicaid plans," you might be taking a popular position and turning it into an unpopular position. So I would not do that.

I do think it's fair for Democrats to say, "We want to keep the government open. We don't want any more disruption. We already have too much disruption. We don't want to see more government workers kicked to the curb. And we'll negotiate with you on the funding levels, but when we agree to those numbers, the president has to meet them. If the president can just ignore what's on our piece of paper and do what he wants, then what are we even talking about here? This law is not going to be worth the paper it's printed on."

That to me is a very fair standard that I think is easy to communicate to the average person. If Republicans say that's a non-starter, Democrats can say, "Look, if you want to live in a government where the president just gets to spend whatever he wants and what Congress says is irrelevant, then you guys figure it out. You have budget reconciliation. You can do this on a party line basis if you can get all your ducks lined up. If that's your deal, then you do it. If you can't do that because you got a few folks who don't want to play ball and you need our help, then we have this very simple demand that what we negotiate actually becomes law." That's where I plant my flag.

Anne K.: Or Congress doing its job as maintaining the power of the purse – the condition is for them to live up to their constitutional duty. Doesn't seem unreasonable.

Bill Scher: It comes down to public opinion. If they think your position is reasonable, then you're not going to get the blame. You may think that what I just said is too complicated for the average voter, but I think it's simple and reasonable enough to say, we're not trying to take something off of our progressive wish list that is ridiculous to expect Republicans to agree to and making that the demand.

I don't know what exactly the numbers are going to be, but I think it'd be fair for Democrats to say, "Look, you want to cut a little bit? I get that. I mean, not dodge cuts, but you're in charge. You're the majority. You want to trim here? Fine. We can be flexible, but the final number has to be the actual number."

Anne K.: On this question of public opinion, it has been astonishing to me that despite all the chaos that's unfolding, Trump's approval ratings are as high as they are. When I looked at the Real Clear Politics average this morning, it had an approval rating of 48.8% to a disapproval of 47.5%. Of course, we don't really know the full impact of all the policy changes and the speech last night. Bill, this is something else you've written about. You think this is actually, when the numbers are split like this, bad news for the Republicans? Can you explain that position?

Bill Scher: Well, it's a downward slide. Trump has lost about seven points in the 538 and the Real Clear Politics averages. I think 538 actually just went a little bit underwater just today. But it depends on what polls you use. Regardless, it's going down. It's going down a month. I think typically a president in a honeymoon starts much higher. They may lose six or seven points in the first month, but from a much higher place.

You have presidents that go underwater relatively quickly. Bill Clinton went underwater by May in 1993. He had a pretty rough go in the first few months and it led to a pretty bad midterm in 1994, although he recovered by 1996. So to slide to either treading water or underwater by the first month is better than Trump 1.0. So you can say this is Trump's most popular position ever, but that's not the benchmark.

Again, if you're in Congress right now as a Republican and you want to stay in the majority, Trump beating, grading Trump on the Trump curve doesn't save your seat. And if you buy the Trump line – "Oh, it's going to be a little painful upfront, we have a little bit of disturbance, but it's all going to look great a year from now" – then maybe you'll go along for the ride. But why would you think that?

What in Trump's history makes you think this is a guy who really understands the nuances of macroeconomics and the granular detail of running government agencies, and that Elon Musk is going at this with a sense of delicacy and care and he's going to ensure that he's just rooting out inefficiencies? It's all going to be more efficient and more productive a year from now? I don't see why anyone who's clear-eyed would think that's what's going to happen a year from now.

That's why I get that a Republican may not want to stick his neck out at this point and risk a primary challenge, but I would probably clam up and not say a bunch of things today that are going to look terrible tomorrow and wait for the moment where I can create some distance, particularly if I'm in a relatively vulnerable district, so I can try to save my own bacon come November 2026.

Anne K.: So what do you guys see as the lead balloon, if anything, that finally sinks Trump's presidency? For any normal politician, you would think that pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists would do it, but that didn't do it. Picking a fight with Canada, the nice people in Canada, that didn't do it. Illegally firing government workers and letting children literally starve, that didn't do it. Siding with Putin on Ukraine and then lying about who started that war, that didn't do it. What's going to do it?

Paul Glastris: Results. Trump won in November, narrowly, but he won for a lot of reasons, but mainly because enough people thought, "Current conditions aren't that great. My life is still tough. We've had decades of no action to make my life better. I'm willing to bank on a guy to really shake things up. What have I got to lose? Things are really bad."

So we're having that moment. He's really shaking things up. And if in two years or four years, things are back to normal, the pain wasn't too bad, we had a transition that was a little bumpy, but people are feeling it – it will have been an amazing world historic gamble on the part of the Republicans and Donald Trump.

I think the higher likelihood is government performance catastrophes like we've not seen, one after another. The former head of the Social Security Administration, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley said, "Within 60 to 90 days, you're going to see checks not arriving." If millions of Americans can't get their Social Security checks and can't get anybody on the phone to help them, and they're in their 70s and 80s and their kids are pulling their hair out all over the country – we've never experienced something like that before.

I'm not saying that's going to happen, but imagine that. Imagine a bird flu breaks out and we've decapitated the CDC. A lot worse can happen. We have a story coming out in the next issue of the magazine that if China decides to take Taiwan, and that would be an excellent moment for them to do so, by the way, when you've got a president trying to take Panama – and they'll say, "Well, you know, all's fair." The first thing they're going to do is bomb the heck out of the American airbase in Guam. Suddenly we have a Pearl Harbor situation.

So I don't think we can imagine what kind of disasters could be happening on Trump's watch. I don't think these guys have thought this through. I know they sound like diabolical Bond villains to a lot of liberals. And I think they've figured out how to hack and destroy, but they've woven a magic outcome in their minds and they're trying to sell that. And that's what you saw Donald Trump do last night.

Bill Scher: Just to add to what Paul is saying in reference to what you were saying about the J6 pardons and things of that nature, I think the average president can do a whole lot of ideological things so long as people's day-to-day lives are better, or at least not disrupted.

I don't think anything Democrats did on transgender issues would have made a difference if people weren't mad about inflation. There are certain things that a president's got to do – the basics. Don't screw up counterterrorism. Don't screw up natural disasters. Don't screw up public health. Don't screw up the basics of the economy – a monocle of growth and no runaway inflation. You do that stuff, you can go hog wild on just about anything else.

Trump has not put anybody in these positions. The people he has named for public health, the positions people have for FEMA or counterterrorism, what he wants to do to FEMA, and what he wants to do in terms of the basic economy and prices – none of this is done with an eye towards maintaining stability and calm so people can go live their lives the way they want to live them.

It smacks of insane incompetence, which is why I end up being a broken record. If I'm a Republican who's thinking clearly, I wouldn't feel good about where this is all going because no one is in a position where they're just going to take care of business in a way that they should be taken care of.

Anne K.: Well, it's going to be – I feel like I end every podcast episode this way by saying it's going to be a long four years. It's going to be a long four years. So on that note, thank you so much. Our guests today have been Bill Scher, who's politics editor of the Washington Monthly, and Washington Monthly editor in chief, Paul Glastris. For those of you out there who joined us today, thank you and please tune in again. Have a great week.